No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The Duality of Empowerment and Marginalization in Microtask Crowdsourcing: Giving Voice to the Less Powerful Through Value Sensitive Design
Abstract
Crowdsourcing (CS) of micro tasks is a relatively new, open source work form enabled by information and communication technologies. While anecdotal evidence of its benefits abounds, our understanding of the phenomenon's societal consequences remains limited. Drawing on value sensitive design (VSD), we explore microtask CS as perceived by crowd workers, revealing their values as a means of informing the design of CS platforms. Analyzing detailed narratives of 210 crowd workers participating in Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), we uncover a set of nine values they share: access, autonomy, fairness, transparency, communication, security, accountability, making an impact, and dignity. We find that these values are implicated in four crowdsourcing structures: compensation, governance, technology, and microtask. Two contrasting perceptions-empowerment and marginalization-coexist, forming a duality of microtask CS. The study contributes to the CS and VSD literatures, heightens awareness of worker marginalization in microtask CS, and offers guidelines for improving CS practice. Specifically, we offer recommendations regarding the ethical use of crowd workers (including for academic research), and call for improving MTurk platform design for greater worker empowerment.
... As a consequence, gig workers feel they are under constant surveillance, which undermines the autonomy that many gig workers value (Möhlmann & Henfridsson, 2019;Möhlmann & Zalmanson, 2017;Vallas & Schor, 2020). The tension between autonomy and control is believed to impact gig workers' turnover (Vallas & Schor, 2020;Wiener et al., 2021), and the feeling of being empowered or marginalizied (Deng et al., 2016). Prior research also identified information attributes, such as asymmetry, lack of transparency, misuse of data, repeatability etc. as concerns for gig workers (Deng, et al., 2016;Hong et al., 2020;Möhlmann & Henfridsson, 2019;Möhlmann & Zalmanson, 2017;Möhlmann et al., 2021). ...
... The tension between autonomy and control is believed to impact gig workers' turnover (Vallas & Schor, 2020;Wiener et al., 2021), and the feeling of being empowered or marginalizied (Deng et al., 2016). Prior research also identified information attributes, such as asymmetry, lack of transparency, misuse of data, repeatability etc. as concerns for gig workers (Deng, et al., 2016;Hong et al., 2020;Möhlmann & Henfridsson, 2019;Möhlmann & Zalmanson, 2017;Möhlmann et al., 2021). On the other hand, the guiding provided by algorithms, i.e., the overseeing and feedback on how they conduct their daily work has a positive effect on drivers' perceived autonomy, fairness and privacy (Wiener et al., 2021). ...
... Reliability and accessibility play an essential role and are regarded as important values in gig employees' work (Deng et al., 2016). For example, Uber searches for drivers by the closest distance. ...
Background: The rapidly growing gig economy brings lots of opportunities and challenges, and one of them is workers’ affective commitment. Because of the gig economy’s nature, gig workers depend on the technology-enabled platform to finish their tasks. We investigate how gig workers’ perception of the platform’s quality, or IS quality, will affect how they perceive organizational support and fairness, which further affects their affective commitment.
Method: We surveyed 239 Uber drivers in Indonesia to test our model via snow-balling technique. We used PLS with a second-order formative construct model to validate our hypotheses.
Results: The results showed that the two dimensions of IS quality, information quality and system quality, were positively associated with organizational support. Only information quality was positively associated with fairness. Both organizational support and fairness were positively associated with affective commitment.
Conclusion: For uber drivers, information quality and system quality of the Uber App serve as drivers of perceived organization support. Information quality also contributes to perceived fairness. Drivers who perceive high organization support and fairness are more likely to be affectively committed to the organization.
Keywords: Gig Economy Workers, Information Quality, System Quality, Affective Commitment.
... This paper describes an exact replication of a study by Deng, Joshi, and Galliers (2016) of crowd worker values on Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) crowdsourcing platform. The original study analyzed 210 MTurk crowd workers' narratives using value sensitive design (VSD). ...
... Digital labor platforms (crowdsourcing platforms) enable job requesters to break down larger jobs into individual tasks (i.e., microtasks) and to source task workers from a "crowd" (i.e., crowdsource) of ready and able people (i.e., crowd workers). However, the rise of digital labor platforms may be a double-edged sword (Deng, Joshi, & Galliers, 2016). Some researchers claim these platforms lead to economic insecurity, low-skilled jobs, increased personal debt, and fewer labor protections for crowd workers (Calo & Rosenblat, 2017;Fleming, 2017). ...
... Some researchers claim these platforms lead to economic insecurity, low-skilled jobs, increased personal debt, and fewer labor protections for crowd workers (Calo & Rosenblat, 2017;Fleming, 2017). Other scholars highlight the benefits that digital labor platforms offer workers seeking alternative work arrangements or new workplace challenges (Deng, Joshi, & Galliers, 2016;Taylor & Joshi, 2019). ...
This paper describes an exact replication of a study by Deng, Joshi, & Galliers (2016) of crowd worker values on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) crowdsourcing platform. The original study analyzed 210 MTurk crowd workers’ narratives using value sensitive design (VSD). The results uncovered nine shared values: access, autonomy, fairness, transparency, communication, security, accountability, making an impact, and dignity. Further analysis in the original study revealed four crowdsourcing structures: compensation, governance, technology, and microtask, and duality of crowd worker perceptions, empowerment, and marginalization. This replication study also asked Amazon Mechanical Turk crowd workers questions about their work and used the original study’s findings for a priori codes. However, new values and findings emerged in our results, which offers additional implications for further research regarding microtask crowdsourcing.
... First, it is not appropriate to conclude that consumer non-participation is merely the opposite of motivations and benefits (Gatignon & Robertson, 1989;Herbig & Day, 1992). This is especially pertinent, as recent crowdsourcing research on participants has revealed potential ethical issues (Schlagwein et al., 2019) and the marginalisation of participants (Deng et al., 2016). This body of research implies that there is more to understand than just motives. ...
... Schlagwein et al. (2019) showed that even when all crowdsourcing participants receive payment for their work, they may view crowdsourcing practices as unfair and feel underpaid for their work. Furthermore, Deng et al. (2016) suggest that (micro-task) crowdsourcing can arouse marginalisation when participants feel unable to exercise certain values important to them (i.e. dignity and safety). ...
... Creative professionals feel disempowered from the creative crowdsourcing process because they believe it leads to unfair competition and, ultimately, to lower prices for their services. Creative crowdsourcing may marginalise them, which aligns with the ethical issues of crowdsourcing practices discussed in previous research (Deng et al., 2016;Djelassi & Decoopman, 2013;Schlagwein et al., 2019). Eventually, while creative professionals associate creative crowdsourcing with exploitation of cheap or even free labour, ordinary consumers are critical when firms invite vulnerable audiences to participate (i.e. ...
Attracting a sufficiently diverse number of participants for the success of firms’ creative crowdsourcing is a critical and persistent issue. Our analysis of 40 in-depth interviews capturing crowd heterogeneity (ordinary consumers and creative professionals), highlights seven barriers to participation. For example, ordinary consumers highlight scepticism towards the firm’s genuine willingness to concede power and perceived illegitimacy; professionals complain about governance unfairness and the lack of regulation. Grouping these barriers into three higher-order themes (crowd-, process- and context-related) creates a novel perspective that encompasses the empowerment-related concerns of heterogeneous crowds better than previous research. The analysis reveals both specific and common (higher purpose) levers that can alleviate these concerns, and it also questions the empowerment promise of creative crowdsourcing and has important implications for business and policymakers.
... These price-based vehicle supply and demand management approaches try to keep the vehicle distribution balanced by preventing undesired rentals from high-demand start locations to low-demand end locations. [22,47,48] Against this background, this study investigates another possible and promising solution to the relocation problem. Specifically, we see potential in relocating vehicles in a way similar to operator-based relocation (i.e., reacting to imbalances and relocating vehicles independently of a rental) by requesting all customers to perform relocation tasks. ...
... There are various definitions of crowdsourcing, of which some have the same and others have different foci. This study follows Howe's [47] widely accepted definition [48] of crowdsourcing as a new way of outsourcing labor. Howe [47] coined "crowdsourcing" as a term that merges the words "crowd" (i.e., an undefined body of individuals, teams, or companies) and "outsourcing" to create an umbrella term for a wide range of ways to recruit a large, open group of people via the internet to source labor or knowledge. ...
... Specifically, in the context of vehicle relocation in car-sharing, we focus on microtask crowdsourcing, which is a crowdsourcing sub-type [48,54]. Based on Deng et al. [48], microtask crowdsourcing is the activity of sending an open call to an undefined group of individuals (i.e., a crowd) via a web-based platform, inviting them to complete tasks in exchange for compensation (e.g., payment). ...
Car-sharing services promise environmentally sustainable and cost-efficient alternatives to private car ownership, contributing to more environmentally sustainable mobility. However, the challenge of balancing vehicle supply and demand needs to be addressed for further improvement of the service. Currently, employees must relocate vehicles from low-demand to high-demand areas, which generates extra personnel costs, driven kilometers, and emissions. This study takes a Design Science Research (DSR) approach to develop a new way of balancing the supply and demand of vehicles in car-sharing, namely crowd-based relocation. We base our approach on crowdsourcing, a concept by which customers are requested to perform vehicle relocations. This paper reports on our comprehensive DSR project on designing and instantiating a crowd-based relocation information system (CRIS). We assessed the resulting artifact in a car-sharing simulation and conducted a real-world car-sharing service system field test. The evaluation reveals that CRIS has the potential for improving vehicle availability, increasing environmental sustainability, and reducing operational costs. Further, the prescriptive knowledge derived in our DSR project can be used as a starting point to improve individual parts of the CRIS and to extend its application beyond car-sharing into other sharing services, such as power bank- or e-scooter-sharing.
... This is particularly important that the life stories of marginalized individuals are not instrumentalized. The voices of marginalized individuals need to be heard and this should be one of the core interests of VSDSI research and teams (Aldridge 2019;Chowdhury 2022;Cibangu 2020;Deng et al. 2016). ...
... Broadening research approaches can help researchers, for example by ensuring that they do justice to marginalized individuals. Particularly through the focus of VSD, values can be used to proactively address the needs of marginalized individuals (Deng et al. 2016;Friedman and Hendry 2019;Kempfert et al. 2022). ...
In this paper, we introduce Value-Sensitive Digital Social Innovation (VSDSI) as a new research field. Integrating insights, goals and methods from Digital Social Innovations (DSI), Value Sensitive Design (VSD), Participatory Design and Research Ethics guidelines, we propose a new research agenda for a more ethically and socially responsible research, design and development of novel technologies. We argue that VSDSI can improve research and design processes in general, but is particularly needed when developing technologies for and with marginalized groups and individuals.
... However, existing evidence challenges this assumption. Deng et al. (2016) found that crowdworkers experienced simultaneous yet contradictory feelings of empowerment and marginalization when interacting with structures that mediated their tasks. Cornford and Klecun (2003, p. 300) proposed that inclusion and exclusion initiatives have an interlinked relation: "while ICTs [information and communication technologies] have the potential to help overcome some forms of exclusion, they may also create new forms or reinforce existing ones" by diminishing opportunities to participate in economic and political life. ...
... Although, in Decide, the IS was designed with the intent to include everyone and anyone, it ultimately could not because there was a paradoxical tension between inclusion and exclusion. While the literature tends to see inclusion and exclusion as opposites, assuming that a decrease in one leads to an increase in the other (Epstein et al., 2011;Warschauer, 2002), the findings of this paper are aligned with work suggesting that inclusion and exclusion are interdependent experiences and two sides of the same coin (Deng et al., 2016;Iivari et al., 2018;Sorochan, 2016). ...
Are social inclusion and social exclusion opposed? Through a three-year ethnography of an open source civic crowdsourcing platform aiming for generalized social inclusion, we show they are not. We argue that social inclusion and exclusion have a paradoxical relationship: ongoing tensions exist between them, and information systems shape those tensions. We find that design choices have crucial influence over information systems interventions’ capacity to include and exclude and propose a framework for designing IS-based social inclusion interventions. The framework encompasses four types of strategies (positive discrimination, integrative oscillation, equitability and iterative inclusivity) for managing the paradoxical link between inclusion and exclusion through IS design. We also present the notion of ‘collectives’ as a new way of thinking about exclusion criteria
... Worse still, because of fewer opportunities, crowdworkers often opt to complete lower quality HITs, posted by less (or non) reputable job requesters to increase their overall income. This is an additional risk for crowdworkers, because less reputable job requesters often reject without an explanation the submitted output, in which case the worker is not paid and the approval rating gets further reduced (Deng et al., 2016). As such, non-script crowdworkers become trapped in a vicious cycle caused by the lack of technical competence, the latter being irrelevant to the actual HITs. ...
... Newcomers to the platform become discouraged due to the indirect obstacles imposed by design (Brawley and Pury, 2016), and those who do not use HIT catching scripts, are more likely to abandon the platform altogether. Previous studies have underlined that high churn rate is indeed a threat for platforms because job requesters may not be able to obtain high quality results for low enough costs (e.g., Deng et al. 2016). In short, Matthew effects, not only ultimately force newcomers and nonscript-using workers to leave the platform, but can potentially lead to the collapse of the platform itself. ...
Crowdworkers on platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk face growing competition as a result of the global excess supply of digital labour. As a result, many crowdworkers turn to automated scripts, which help them locate better tasks faster and to boost their earnings. However, to date, it is not clear whether and to what extent the use of such scripts influence the opportunities for those crowdworkers who do not use them. This an important aspect that warrants further exploration because it can have negative implications for the health of crowdwork platforms. In this study, we use Discrete Event Simulation to identify and quantify the unintended consequences of the excessive use of automated scripts. Our findings show that, while the use of scripts allows some crowdworkers to identify and accept far more tasks than others, in the long run, this behaviour results in their competence persistence and reputational persistence and progressively to detrimental impacts for those workers who do not use scripts, and who may ultimately be forced to exit the platform. As a result, automated scripts have negative consequences, whereby their excessive use leads to a tragedy of the commons for all platform stakeholders, including the crowdworkers, the job requesters and the platform itself.
... Aspiring for fairer work environments is beneficial for workers, platform owners, policymakers, and society at large. Workers expect fairness on DLPs (Deng et al., 2016), especially when they are managed by technology that is supposedly more 'objective' than humans (Ryan & Wessel, 2015). Failure to meet workers' expectations of fairness not only adversely affects their job satisfaction and trust (Liu & Liu, 2019), but is also detrimental to platform owners through higher turnovers (Ma et al., 2018;Song et al., 2020). ...
... In line with other scholars (e.g., Meijerink et al., 2021), we study AM as practices that represent activities, such as performance appraisals. While it has been recognized, that working on DLPs has advantages and disadvantages for workers (e.g., Deng et al., 2016), it remains unclear, how fairness on DLPs can be promoted by AM practices. ...
Algorithmic management (AM) is employed on digital labor platforms (DLPs) to efficiently manage interactions between workers and clients. However, AM comes with ethical challenges, such as unfairness. Identifying best practices that counter these challenges promises to deliver actionable solutions. Therefore, we identify AM practices that workers deem particularly fair. We conduct seven online focus groups with a diverse set of platform workers and analyze the data through an organizational justice lens. Our findings reveal that AM practices can promote fairness by providing information, empowering workers, or autonomously executing tasks in their interest. Alternatively, in the case unfairness occurred, AM practices can redress unfairness. These practices include delegating dispute resolution to the involved actors, investigating evidence, and autonomously determining restorative consequences. Our findings have theoretical implications for fairness in algorithms, AM, and organizational justice literature. They might also be adopted in practice to improve workers' conditions on DLPs.
... O debate em torno dos benefícios e riscos da gig economy (Graham, 2021) caracterizase pela polarização entre visões otimistas, tendentes a ressaltar aspectos como a flexibilidade e a liberdade do trabalho, e outras críticas, em que a insegurança e a instabilidade experimentadas por "freelancers de curto prazo" ganham destaque (Wentrup et al., 2019, p. 21). Tamanho contraste se mostra igualmente presente em manifestações dos próprios trabalhadores gig, ora de empoderamento, ora de marginalização (Deng et al., 2016). Ainda na dimensão micro de análise, notam-se divergências no que se refere às motivações dos trabalhadores para se engajar na gig economy. ...
... A quantidade de publicações em determinado período é uma ferramenta de análise bibliométrica (Ellegaard e Wallin, 2015) que informa a abrangência das publicações científicas temporalmente, auxiliando pesquisadores a identificar campos de estudos em desenvolvimento (Zupic e Čater, 2015), portanto, oportunidades de pesquisa. Deng et al. (2016), com 89 citações, cuja discussão central envolve crowdsourcing, ou seja, terceirização de microtarefas prestadas remotamente por ferramentas de tecnologia da informação. Norlander et al. (2020) desenvolveram o estudo mais recente, em que são discutidos os impactos da supervisão tecnológica de motoristas da Uber, e a influência dessa plataforma nos serviços de táxi e limusine, além de estar relacionado ao controle e motivação desses trabalhadores. ...
O presente trabalho tem como objetivo examinar a literatura científica internacional com vistas a contribuir para o aprofundamento do conhecimento acerca da gig economy, em estudos desenvolvidos a partir da perspectiva do trabalhador. Para tanto, empregamos três modelos de análises: bibliométrica, cientométrica e de conteúdo, que forneceram um retrato dinâmico de como se estrutura o domínio de conhecimento deste campo atualmente. Os resultados evidenciam que o campo é altamente recente e promissor, com início em 2016, marcado pela publicação em periódicos com alto fator de impacto, situados, em geral, no primeiro quartil, o que informa que o campo de estudos é de interesse da comunidade acadêmica internacional. Além disso, identificamos os principais autores e documentos cocitados, as palavras-chave com maior ocorrência e com maior explosão de citações, descortinando tendências sobre o tema. Propomos a classificação dos estudos deste campo em três perspectivas: The Bright Side, The Dark Side e Regulação do Estado. Por fim, propusemos rotas de investigação em forma de desafios a serem superados pelos pesquisadores. Tal agenda de pesquisa convida os investigadores a contribuírem na edificação de um campo em construção.
... Further, matching and searching algorithms constitute a significant part of user trust. Specifically, a user's trust in the matches depends on the perception of platform capabilities or wisdom in making trustworthy connections (Deng et al., 2016). However, discrimination still occurs in sharing economy under the current matching algorithm. ...
... The growth of a SE platform relies heavily on the algorithms of service and operation optimization and the governance of data, relatively little attention has been given to advancing the understanding of the data governance of SE platforms. Previous studies infer that platforms often actively surveil participants (Deng et al., 2016;Kuhn and Maleki, 2017), either through rating system or through direct data collection to ensure quality. However, user-generated data from different sources have not been fully used despite their rich information and strong association. ...
This paper offers a holistic review of the role of big data analytics in sharing economy (SE). Academic literature in this field is analyzed to show the theoretical foundation, important papers, and key themes underlying the field by using various bibliometric analysis tools. We conduct a citation and co-citation analysis on literature concerning big data analytics in sharing economy, which published in the 12-year period from 2010–2021. A total of 205 papers were screened from Web of Science (WoS) database for our analysis. In the citation analysis, we depend on the degree centrality and betweenness centrality to identify 48 important papers. In the co-citation analysis, four major research themes are identified: sustainable business model, efficient match-making, trust building and innovation and value cocreation. The research also highlights future research directions and critical areas for the application of big data analytics in the SE context, which may help to produce in-depth studies.
... A crowd may refer to a group of online workers [9], consumers [10], volunteers [11], solvers [12], peers [13], donors [14], ideators [15], co-creators [16], contestants [17], and the most frequently mentioned contributors [18]. Definitions in the extant literature are generally vague. ...
... In comparison to in-house operations or outsourcing, crowdsourcing can be more cost-effective in performing certain tasks [21]. A major reason for this is that a crowd usually possesses weak bargaining power, whereas a crowdsourcer retains strong bargaining power to set the offer [9]. Additionally, financial rewards are not a compulsory feature of crowdsourcing. ...
Crowdsourcing, as a crowd-centered approach, is becoming increasingly popular for organizations to conduct outsourcing, research and development (R&D), and marketing. The effectiveness of a crowdsourcing initiative, as manifested in specific outcomes, depends significantly on the salient characteristics of the configured crowd. This study aims to investigate which business purposes necessitate which crowds with which characteristics. Contributions of this study include: 1) defining a crowd in crowdsourcing by distinguishing the roles of individuals, 2) introducing and defining three crowd attributes to depict the salient characteristics of a crowd, and 3) proposing a typology of eight crowd configurations by combining high or low levels of the three crowd attributes and examining each crowd configuration to highlight the relationships between crowd attributes and crowdsourcing outcomes. Eight mini cases corresponding to the eight crowd configurations are presented to illustrate how crowd configurations were implemented in real-life situations. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed respectively.
... Therefore, prior literature calls for an integration of all actors in the study of interactions on digital platforms (de Reuver et al. 2018;Schreieck et al. 2016). As a starting point, Deng et al. (2016) highlight the importance of decision rights for worker empowerment. We expand on their view and investigate how decision rights are partitioned across all three actors that can be involved when making decisions on DLPs, namely platform owners, workers and clients. ...
... The classification also revealed that workers have the least overall influence on decision making on DLPs, while platform owners have the most overall influence (key finding 2). While workers use forums to exchange their experiences on the platform, their voices are seldom heard by platform owners (Deng et al. 2016). However, worker empowerment and well-being are the main goals of DLP regulators (Choudary 2018). ...
Digital labor platforms (DLPs) enable new work arrangements by connecting workers who sell their labor, with clients, who purchase their services through the platform. As platform governance in the multi-actor setting is complex, we provide platform actors, policy makers, and researchers with an overview of the possible configurations of platform governance on DLPs. By focusing on "who" makes decisions, the influence platform owners, worker, and clients have on the platform is surfaced. Our taxonomy differentiates decision rights throughout the service transaction process, which includes matchmaking, price setting, scope setting, process control direct exchange and quality control. We classify 106 DLPs and find that platform owners can exert considerable influence or, alternatively, empower workers and clients by granting them decisions rights. A cluster analysis results in three archetypes which show that the influence of the platform owner increases from open marketplace DLPs, to cooperative DLPs, to platform-controlled DLPs.
... Information systems (IS) can enable or impede the social inclusion of such groups through the design of technologies (Díaz et al., 2016;Hsieh et al., 2008;Pethig & Kroenung, 2019). Scholars in IS have recognized the problem of social inclusion (AbuJarour et al., 2019;Carter et al., 2013;Myers et al., 2020;Trauth, 2017) and investigated it in diverse contexts (e.g., AbuJarour & Krasnova, 2017;Deng et al., 2016;Gallivan, 2013;Joshi & Schmidt, 2006;Trauth et al., 2016). ...
We develop principles that facilitate socially inclusive design-oriented research with marginalized groups. Building on the recognition that the research process must be informed by theoretical perspectives about social inclusion, our effort begins with an empirical investigation of a multiyear research project that designed several IT-based solutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. We treat the efforts to design each solution as a “case,” capture primary data from multiple sources, and analyze it in light of three facets of social inclusion drawn from prior work: self-determination, belongingness, and social capital. The findings are interpreted to derive five principles for a socially inclusive design-oriented research process: (1) respecting multiperspective problem ownership and integrated solution design, (2) surfacing emic contributions to guide artifact design, (3) leveraging the support network to shape artifact design and refine research conduct, (4) customizing design-evaluate cycles with inclusive practices, and (5) pursuing authenticity in research collaborations. We elaborate each principle with connections to different facets of social inclusion, guidelines suggested by our empirical investigation, and a mapping against contemporary design-oriented research approaches. The five principles suggest key directions to facilitate a socially inclusive design-oriented research process when working with marginalized groups. The paper concludes with a discussion of implications for IS scholars, and pointers for using design-oriented approaches for greater social inclusion of marginalized populations.
... IS research is already equipped with the critical and value sensitive lenses (e.g. Kvasny & Richardson 2006, Deng et al. 2016), both of which should be made of use of in this endeavor. Friedman (1999) has identified three kinds of value bias in information systems: preexisting bias, technical bias and emergent bias. ...
Home energy technologies, such as smart home energy management systems (SHEMS), are important in reducing energy-related emissions and empowering energy users. However, there are concerns on gender inclusiveness of the adoption and use of SHEMS. So far, information systems research has failed to address this significant challenge. This study examines factors shaping gendered adoption and use of smart home technologies, particularly SHEMS, and the implications this has for sustainability and energy equality. Applying a critical lens, we examine findings from a sensory ethnographic study on the adoption of SHEMS in households. The findings underline the need for more inclusive energy technology design, more understanding of diversity of households and more variety in the approaches for increasing awareness on and facilitating the adoption of energy technologies. We contribute to research on gender and home energy technologies, and to the larger discussion of gender and energy.
... Since platform and digital artefacts serve as core products that interact with and are directly experienced by users, digital startups exhibiting IT expertise are initially found to be more competitive (Sutherland & Jarrahi, 2018). By providing a recognised technical edge, IT experience demonstrates the venture's capability of catering to user preference and responding quickly in addressing technical issues and user needs (Deng et al., 2016;Masoud & Jayakrishnan, 2017;Nuscheler et al., 2019;Sutherland & Jarrahi, 2018). This IT advantage is best achieved by realising brilliant ideas and offering accessible functions or modes on the digital platform that are easily available to general users. ...
This paper addresses how weak and strong signals affect venture capital funding acquired by digital startups at their early stage in various industries of China. We also articulate the interaction mechanism of these strong and weak signals by demonstrating their complementary or substitutive effects in alleviating information asymmetry on startup quality, which can help digital startups secure venture capital financing. Drawing on signalling theory and institutional legitimacy theory, we introduce application (app) downloads as a novel strong signal that can reduce market legitimacy concerns, and previous‐round venture capitalist reputation as a traditional strong signal that mitigates regulatory legitimacy concerns. We treat founders' startup and IT experience as weak signals, as they provide rhetorical and indirect information indicating a startup's potential to establish regulatory and market legitimacy. The study empirically investigates our hypotheses using data of 163 digital startups in various industries of China. Results confirm the positive relationships between strong signals and venture capital funding secured by a digital startup. Furthermore, signals of similar strength are found to complement each other's effects in certain situations, while strong signals can reduce the effects of weak signals on a digital startup's financing performance under specific conditions that create these mixed effects. Implications for digital startup research and practice as well as limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.
... The gig may be connected to time rather than task. From production to management, this new form of gig work and gig workers could support organizations with volatile, uncertain, complex, or ambiguous contexts rather than a race-to-the-bottom to micro-tasks and limited compensation (e.g., Deng et al. 2016). ...
Open organizations are structures in which members of the public engage in work for the organization. Examples include open-source software, Amnesty International, Wikipedia, and Lego communities. Much research focuses on structural design characteristics of open organizations, such as pre-specified task divisions and integration teams. These practices require the organization to a priori structure in response to its mission. Increasingly, however, open organizations like CrowdDoing and Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HyperloopTT) require public involvement across volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA) contexts. These open organizations must respond to changing political, competitive, and socio-economic events. Structural clarity is more difficult, and contributors may participate in the creative development of new technologies, new policies, and new sources of funding. Working from practices supporting participant engagement in more stable environments, we qualitatively observe HyperloopTT to understand internal practices for open organizing in more VUCA contexts. We observe four practices allowing for the flexibility, versatility, and accommodations needed for open organizing in such settings. The HyperloopTT practices allow more porosity and self-determination—not simply in how people divide and integrate tasks, but also in the exploration and experimentation of the work itself. More than task workers, we see a new class of open organizing participants: creative work designers.
... In Tables 1 and 2, we provide definitions of the respective factors and the alignment of the data with the theoretical factors. Multimedia Appendix 2 [18,27,[30][31][32][33] provides a working example of how the VSD factors were adapted from the work of Friedman et al [27] and Dadgar and Joshi [18], and Multimedia Appendix 3 [17,18] presents data excerpt examples. ...
Background:
An important strategy to understand young people's needs regarding technologies for type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) management is to examine their day-to-day experiences with these technologies.
Objective:
This study aimed to examine young people's and their caregivers' experiences with diabetes technologies in an exploratory way and relate the findings to the existing technology acceptance and technology design theories. On the basis of this procedure, we aimed to develop device characteristics that meet young people's needs.
Methods:
Overall, 16 in-person and web-based face-to-face interviews were conducted with 7 female and 9 male young people with T1DM (aged between 12 and 17 years) and their parents between December 2019 and July 2020. The participants were recruited through a pediatric diabetes clinic based at Canberra Hospital. Data-driven thematic analysis was performed before theory-driven analysis to incorporate empirical data results into the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) and value-sensitive design (VSD). We used the COREQ (Consolidated Criteria for Reporting Qualitative Research) checklist for reporting our research procedure and findings. In this paper, we summarize the key device characteristics that meet young people's needs.
Results:
Summarized interview themes from the data-driven analysis included aspects of self-management, device use, technological characteristics, and feelings associated with device types. In the subsequent theory-driven analysis, the interview themes aligned with all UTAUT and VSD factors except for one (privacy). Privacy concerns or related aspects were not reported throughout the interviews, and none of the participants made any mention of data privacy. Discussions around ideal device characteristics focused on reliability, flexibility, and automated closed loop systems that enable young people with T1DM to lead an independent life and alleviate parental anxiety. However, in line with a previous systematic review by Brew-Sam et al, the analysis showed that reality deviated from these expectations, with inaccuracy problems reported in continuous glucose monitoring devices and technical failures occurring in both continuous glucose monitoring devices and insulin pumps.
Conclusions:
Our research highlights the benefits of the transdisciplinary use of exploratory and theory-informed methods for designing improved technologies. Technologies for diabetes self-management require continual advancement to meet the needs and expectations of young people with T1DM and their caregivers. The UTAUT and VSD approaches were found useful as a combined foundation for structuring the findings of our study.
... For instance, Deliveroo suggests in its online forum, Roo Community, that the most reliable service providers will be favoured for jobs, although to what extent is unclear (Veen et al., 2020). As such, algorithmic control uses varying means to achieve market-oriented outcomes: it can reinforce traditional regimes of formal control (Deng et al., 2016) or be informal, such as when it takes the form of behavioural nudging to encourage certain behaviours (Möhlmann et al., 2021;Pregenzer et al., 2020;Rosenblat, 2018). ...
Digital platforms are supraorganizational entities that use digital technology to facilitate interactions between diverse actors, leading to novel forms of organisation and accompanying forms of control. The current Information Systems (IS) literature, however, struggles to describe control on digital platforms in a way that does justice to the dynamic character of the phenomenon. Taking this as an opportunity, we follow the enactment of control over time and across parties in a hybrid ethnographic study of the social commerce platform Poshmark. Specifically, we conceptualise the dynamics of control as changes in the means of control—formal or informal—and the sources of control—operator or participants—over time. Tracking these conceptual dimensions, we identify the distinct ways control has changed on Poshmark. Synthesising these findings into four dynamics of control, we show that control on digital platforms is rarely static due to aggregate effects arising from the operator and from participant interactions with each other through the digital features deployed on the platform. Based on these insights, our study contributes to the IS literature on control by broadening the conception of control on digital platforms. The theoretical and practical insights generated in this paper thereby lay the foundation for the systematic study of the dynamics of control that are unique to platform environments.
... Regarding the effects of digital technology, previous studies on IT's societal impacts indicate that IT encourages participation by employees, citizens, and socioeconomically disadvantaged groups through empowerment. For example, by letting the participant select the job activities that are personally meaningful and decide how to get the work done, crowdsourcing platforms, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, enhance the participants' perceptions of their competence and impacts, and thus overall engagement (Deng et al. 2016). Similarly, empowerment has been found important to citizens' participation in e-government initiatives (Kang 2014;Naranjo-Zolotov et al. 2019). ...
Does digital technology help or hinder the realization of social justice in government services? Applying theories of distributive justice, we analyzed 10-year data from Boston's 311 system (for residents to make requests for non-emergency services) paired with data from the American Community Survey. We found that, as residents used the system's digital channels (website and mobile app) more frequently, they submitted more requests. However, such technical efficiency from digital channel use, to our surprise, exacerbated the disparities between high-income and low-income communities in request volume. This unexpected finding may be explained by the uneven channel use trajectories and distributions of repeat users in different communities, as our additional analysis shows. These results not only have exposed previously hidden inequalities but also may help reconcile different theories of distributive justice. Practically speaking, technical efficiency and social justice should be balanced when employing digital technology in coproducing government services.
... Our results allow us to join the current conversation on positive and negative experiences on platforms by focusing on the emotions associated to different algorithmic affordances and behaviours. Although a negative view of algorithms and platforms' mechanisms prevails (e.g., Curchod et al., 2020;Irani, 2015;Rahman, 2021), some scholars have started to acknowledge positive experiences (Bellesia et al., 2019;Deng et al., 2016;Elbanna and Idowu, 2022;Idowu and Elbanna, 2021;Kellogg et al., 2020;Wood et al., 2019). On the one hand, as algorithms increase control over workers, they contribute to workers' feelings of frustration, isolation, uncertainty, and even anger (e.g., Cameron and Rahman, 2022;Wood et al., 2019). ...
On online labour platforms, algorithmic scores are used as indicators of freelancers' work quality and future performance. Recent studies underscore that, to achieve good scores and secure their presence on platforms, freelancers respond to algorithmic control in different ways. However, we argue, to fully understand how freelancers deal with algorithmic scores, we first need to investigate how they interpret scores and, more specifically, what scores can do for them, i.e., perceived algorithmic affordances and constraints. Our interviews and other qualitative data collected with knowledge intensive gig workers on a major platform allow us to explain how the perceived affordances of algorithms (i.e., barrier, individual visibility, self-extension, rule of the game) act as mechanisms that explain different behavioural and emotional responses over time. Our work contributes to the current debate on the positive and negative consequences of algorithmic work by portraying the fundamental role paid by the individual interpretation of algorithmic scores and by integrating the affordance perspective into our understanding of algorithmic work.
... Yet, we also recognise that this is not an exhaustive categorisation. These categories are important because researchers are now recognizing that implemented quality control mechanisms must not only be effective but also should be respectful of the worker [16]- [18]. As such, it is not just a case of identifying which quality control mechanism(s) will maximise specific notions of quality. ...
Crowd sourcing and human computation has slowly become a mainstay for many application areas that seek to leverage the crowd in the development of high quality datasets, annotations, and problem solving beyond the reach of current AI solutions. One of the major challenges to the domain is ensuring high-quality and diligent work. In response, the literature has seen a large number of quality control mechanisms each voicing (sometimes domain-specific) benefits and advantages when deployed in largescale human computation projects. This creates a complex design space for practitioners: it is not always clear which mechanism(s) to use for maximal quality control. In this article, we argue that this decision is perhaps overinflated and that provided there is “some kind” of quality control that this obviously known to crowd workers this is sufficient for “high-quality” solutions. To evidence this, and provide a basis for discussion, we undertake two experiments where we explore the relationship between task design, task complexity, quality control and solution quality. We do this with tasks from natural language processing, and image recognition of varying complexity. We illustrate that minimal quality control is enough to repel constantly underperforming contributors and that this is constant across tasks of varying complexity and formats. Our key takeaway: quality control is necessary, but seemingly not how it is implemented.
... Extant research mainly focuses on the performance and strategy of sponsors while ignoring fraud detection and risk control. Some researchers have theoretically discussed the importance of crowdsourcing sponsors' fraudulent behaviors (Deng et al., 2016;Pang, 2015;Pennebaker, 2013;Schlagwein et al., 2019). However, there are few in-depth empirical studies on this kind of fraud related to intellectual property. ...
As an important mode of open innovation, crowdsourcing can effectively integrate external resources, enabling enterprises to obtain stronger competitiveness and more benefits at a faster speed and lower cost. However, this mode has inevitable intellectual property protection challenges, especially on contest-based crowdsourcing platforms. Previous studies mostly focused on the protection of the rights of sponsors while ignoring the rights of workers, rarely paying attention to sponsor fraud, which may reduce the enthusiasm of participants and eventually turn crowdsourcing;' into a lemon market. This study proposes several fraud detection models to address this problem on contest-based crowdsourcing platforms. Furthermore, this paper explores and compares the value of four types of information as deception cues in crowdsourcing contexts via data mining technology and machine learning methods. The results benefit participants in crowdsourcing markets and contribute to fraud detection research and open innovation in the knowledge economy.
... Remuneration in crowdworking has attracted increasing public attention, primarily through initiatives by trade unions (Leimeister et al. 2016;DGB 2021), governmental and non-governmental agencies (Dengler and Matthes 2015;FairCrowdWork 2017), and crowdworkers themselves (Salehi et al. 2015;Healy et al. 2020), often supported by research (Deng et al. 2016;Saito et al. 2019;Whiting et al. 2019). Crowdworkers often discuss the conditions on the crowdworking platform and the attractiveness of certain jobs in forums. ...
In the past decade, crowdworking on online labor market platforms has become an important source of income for a growing number of people worldwide. This development has led to increasing political and scholarly interest in the wages people can earn on such platforms. This study extends the literature, which is often based on a single platform, region, or category of crowdworking, through a meta-analysis of prevalent hourly wages. After a systematic literature search, the paper considers 22 primary empirical studies, including 105 wages and 76,765 data points from 22 platforms, eight different countries, and 10 years. It is found that, on average, microtasks results in an hourly wage of less than $6. This wage is significantly lower than the mean wage of online freelancers, which is roughly three times higher when not factoring in unpaid work. Hourly wages accounting for unpaid work, such as searching for tasks and communicating with requesters, tend to be significantly lower than wages not considering unpaid work. Legislators and researchers evaluating wages in crowdworking need to be aware of this bias when assessing hourly wages, given that the majority of literature does not account for the effect of unpaid work time on crowdworking wages. To foster the comparability of different research results, the article suggests that scholars consider a wage correction factor to account for unpaid work. Finally, researchers should be aware that remuneration and work processes on crowdworking platforms can systematically affect the data collection method and inclusion of unpaid work.
... The motives and incentives of contractors for working on external crowdwork platforms are very diverse. The most common ones are flexibility in time and place, autonomy in task selection, creative work and learning new skills (Bertschek et al., 2015;Deng et al., 2016;Al-Ani and Stumpp, 2015). Fair pay also has a positive effect on job satisfaction (Brawley and Pury, 2016). ...
... The findings show that social support from professional communities enhances group identifications among individuals and the perceived meaningfulness of undertaking the task, thereby fostering crowd engagement. Deng et al. [39] reveal that a crowd's continuous participation is influenced by task characteristics and the digitally enabled platform environment. Lan and Toubia [40] prove that the strategic timing of releasing contributions to particular types of crowd members may influence their behaviors. ...
Nowadays, crowdsourcing has become a popular way of sourcing. As intermediaries that connect crowdsourcers and crowds, crowdsourcing platforms integrate state-of-the-art information technologies and specialized organizational functions to host and govern crowdsourcing projects. The extant literature on crowdsourcing has investigated numerous aspects of crowdsourcing platforms. However, a majority of studies are project-oriented and short-term focused. There is a lack of a holistic view of crowdsourcing platforms as enterprises with a developmental perspective. This study aims to address this issue by investigating business sustainability of crowdsourcing platforms. By considering temporal dimensions and multiple interpretations of business sustainability, a conceptual framework is proposed to investigate the sustainability of a crowdsourcing platform by analyzing the key business process, value co-creation, and business development, which is a major theoretical contribution of the study. A case study of LEGO Ideas is presented to illustrate the practical implementation of the proposed framework. Both theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
... The motives and incentives of contractors for working on external crowdwork platforms are very diverse. The most common ones are flexibility in time and place, autonomy in task selection, creative work and learning new skills (Bertschek et al., 2015;Deng et al., 2016;Al-Ani and Stumpp, 2015). Fair pay also has a positive effect on job satisfaction (Brawley and Pury, 2016). ...
... The aim of these studies is to explore specific aspects of ICT. The second trend is to explore the specific type of IT, for example, group support systems [38], crowdsourcing [39], gaming platforms [40], knowledge management systems [41], etc. The aim of these studies is to research the specific ICT types and related aspects. ...
Digitisation of business processes has attracted practitioner attention across a wide range of industries as it enables enterprises to better manage their processes and improve results. The rate of digitisation has grown over the last decade and has become essential for enterprises to handle unforeseen disruptions and promote better management of resources. The COVID-19 pandemic is one example of a recent major disruption that caught enterprises off-guard and had a major impact on their value chains. The adoption of digitisation of business processes has significantly sped up to improve enterprise and their value chain resilience and enable enterprises to survive and potentially thrive in today’s uncertain environment. Through this movement, innovative companies have embraced idea management to develop new business models and achieve competitive advantage. One of the major digital tools that support enterprises in their idea management efforts is web-based idea management systems. This study aims to show how enterprises can manage the rewards of platforms, such as web-based idea management systems, to achieve a first-in-class quality and quantity of ideas sourced from the stakeholders involved in these platform-based ecosystems. To reach this aim, a global survey study was conducted involving over 400 responses from enterprises that use web-based idea management systems and consequent results were analysed. The impact of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards on the results of enterprises is a well-researched area. To further verify the results, the authors have conducted ten expert interviews and a qualitative analysis of a data set sourced from a database that contained 129 company entries that utilise web-based idea management systems and was available for this research that was conducted over a two-year period. Results strongly indicate that mixed and financial reward type tasks result in a higher quantity of ideas created, however, higher idea quality—i.e., ideas selected—is higher for financial reward tasks. The research highlights that there could be differences between different web-based idea management systems application groups.
... Therefore, the terms like "crowdsourcing", "sharing economy", or the "collaborative economy" are usually adopted to describe this phenomenon. More specifically, previous studies revealed that various terms had been used to refer to platform workers, including gig workers Roll (2020aRoll ( , 2020b, freelancers (Kokkodis & Ipertoris, 2016) (Westregård, 2020), crowdworkers (Deng et al., 2016), driver-partners (Hall & Krueger, 2016), service providers (Allon et al., 2012), or sellers (Moreno & Terwiesch, 2014), depending on context and the authors' academic discipline. For clearer policymaking, the government undoubtedly needs to separate these terminologies for each platform worker segment to formulate appropriate and effective legislation. ...
The chapter has focussed on the opportunities and challenges linked to the gig economy and conditions of working for the gig workers. With the passage of time, more gig working is being added to various industries as flexible working, ad hoc employment and part-time working have become a norm. For many of the sectors, gig working has been a norm and would continue to be so like ride sharing, retails store and also food delivery service. But on the same front, many unethical work practices are associated with gig working as the interest of the workers is compromised. These lead to many kinds of unethical practices, job insecurity, no proper wages and pay, poor leave policy and lack of well-being benefits of being treated as actual full-time employees. Many such cases of USA, UK and India-based companies have been analysed for the same analysis that would help in better management of gig workers in the future. It has also been highlighted that it is the responsibility of the companies to adopt more ethical and sustainable work practices that help the gig economy develop along with being counted as core work force.
... Therefore, the terms like "crowdsourcing", "sharing economy", or the "collaborative economy" are usually adopted to describe this phenomenon. More specifically, previous studies revealed that various terms had been used to refer to platform workers, including gig workers Roll (2020aRoll ( , 2020b, freelancers (Kokkodis & Ipertoris, 2016) (Westregård, 2020), crowdworkers (Deng et al., 2016), driver-partners (Hall & Krueger, 2016), service providers (Allon et al., 2012), or sellers (Moreno & Terwiesch, 2014), depending on context and the authors' academic discipline. For clearer policymaking, the government undoubtedly needs to separate these terminologies for each platform worker segment to formulate appropriate and effective legislation. ...
The world is witnessing a rise in the game-changing service-based platforms; hence, a research-based case study on Urban Company (UC), the fastest-growing Indian start-up, has been developed using secondary sources of information. UC provides a platform for different services ranging from plumbing, electrical, cleaning to yoga, etc., and acts as a mobile marketplace. The company maintains a record of its service providers (also known as partners) and presents the list of such providers to the customers on its mobile app. This case study explores the different HR practices of the company for its full-time employees versus partners to highlight the differences in benefits available to the UC’s contract workers vis-à-vis permanent workers; also, the case discusses why and how the company might assign the status of a full-time employee to its partners. The study suggests that for sustaining its competitive position in the long run UC needs to maintain a balance between providing excellence in service and receiving continuous support of a trusted pool of professionals through providing “employee status” to its partners.
... Existing as a take-it-or-leave-it condition, users must accept the ToU to access the app and find work [63]. These unilateral conditions coerce workers into an independent contractor status [64] or impose the risk of client payment rejections and other liabilities that render workers powerless against platform companies [41,65]. Moreover, arbitrary deactivations and changes to worker piece rate with limited or no option for recourse incapacitate workers and increase emotional demands [22,66,67]. ...
The platform economy’s emergence challenges the current labor regulations hinged upon
the binary employer–employee relations established during the industrial age. While this burgeoning phenomenon presents several possibilities for workers, customers, and businesses alike, scholars from various fields have sounded alarms regarding pitfalls in platform-mediated work (PMW). The regulation of working conditions, health, and safety risks are integral to these worries. Drawing upon existing research and empirical data from 49 qualitative interviews with several stakeholders, this paper explores the various dimensions of power exerted by platforms and the mismatch with the current risk regulatory framework. Four regulatory gaps are identified and the concept ‘regulatory
escape’ is introduced. The study posits that taming powerful platforms requires harnessing adequate regulatory capacity grounded on developing an expansive view of regulation that encompasses all forms of socio-economic influence. The paper invokes reflection on the existing regulatory systems in society and calls for a more profound and inclusive debate on platform-mediated work and how regulatory gaps can be closed.
... To put this into practice in our workshop, we will have guided activities using the value sensitive design framework to help participants identify the different needs of the different stakeholders, as well as points where there are conflicts between needs. Through this, we will empower participants to start to design solutions that aim to empower all stakeholders [14]. We will aim to include also all stakeholders as participants in our workshop. ...
... Building on value sensitive design theory, we examine how the possible risks turn into deficits and how these negative aspects can overtake and replace the positive potential of the AI system. [10][11][12] The paper is structured as follows: First we provide theoretical insight on AI in the workplace, including our theoretical framework of value sensitive design theory. Then, we describe our methodological approach, including a description of the AI system used in our case company and the data collection process and analysis. ...
This study examines the design and implementation of an AI Sales Assistant (AISA) in several companies to understand the relationship between value sensitive design and successful implementation of AI assistants. While the AISA was designed to help and support collaboration, this study found that rather than supporting sales associates, the AISA evolved into a system to exclusively track and monitor them. This study reveals that while values important to the sales associates were considered in its design, a Value Sensitive Design approach to include all stakeholders and their values in the design process might have led to better outcomes.
... Prior work identified a set of nine values that AMT workers share: access, autonomy, fairness, transparency, communication, security, accountability, making an impact, and dignity [15]. In this paper, we focused on a single value held by crowdworkers: autonomy, conceptualised as temporal flexibility. ...
Crowdworking platforms are a prime example of a product that sells flexibility to its consumers. In this paper, we argue that crowdworking platforms sell temporal flexibility to requesters to the detriment of workers. We begin by identifying a list of 19 features employed by crowdworking platforms that facilitate the trade of temporal flexibility from crowdworkers to requesters. Using the list of features, we conduct a comparative analysis of nine crowdworking platforms available to U.S.-based workers, in which we describe key differences and similarities between the platforms. We find that crowdworking platforms strongly favour features that promote requesters’ temporal flexibility over workers’ by limiting the predictability of workers’ working hours and restricting paid time. Further, we identify which platforms employ the highest number of features that facilitate the trade of temporal flexibility from workers to requesters, consequently increasing workers’ temporal precarity. We conclude the paper by discussing the implications of the results.
The impact of digital technologies on the environmental and economic sides of sustainability has received considerable attention. In contrast, the societal implications are quite under‐researched. Through a systematic literature review, we describe the current status of the research on the impacts that digital technologies have on social sustainability. We pay particular attention to methods used for assessing and measuring these impacts. One positive observation made from our descriptive (bibliometric) analysis is that there is an increasing interest in social sustainability. Our content analysis identified four categories, namely “Area of Impact,” “Approach to technology,” “Measured/Measurable Effect,” and “Measuring Methods”, accumulating 30 labels, which we use to classify the papers at study. A quite common label is “Jobs” as the area of impacts, whereas the least used label in the approach to technology category is “Cyber‐security,” signaling that few papers that investigate the impacts of digital technologies on social sustainability consider their security and privacy implications. Other gaps that we expose are the lack of empirical data as well as the lack of mathematical modeling when measuring the effects of digital technologies, with direct experiments appearing very seldom in the literature. In an attempt to provide a guide for future research, we identify five general research gaps, listing 20 specific research questions, and propose a structuring procedure for articles on social implications of digital technologies to be produce in a more systematic manner.
A typology of agricultural market information systems and its
dimensions: Case studies of digital platforms
The literature elucidates the evolution of agricultural market information systems and their impact on value chain networks.
However, the existing theoretical frameworks prove inadequate in capturing and cataloging emerging initiatives in the
changing contour of agricultural systems. The domain presents a substantial heterogeneity in research and practice and
suggests the need for taxonomy schematics. Guided by the network externality theory, agency theory, and information and
communication technology for development 2.0 framework, we review and synthesize the literature and propose a typology
that classifies agricultural systems into standalone, integrated, and self-organizing platforms. Through desk research
on archives, we perform case analyses of five representative systems operating in emerging markets. The findings drawn
from the archival analysis were triangulated with domain experts’ interviews. We consider five dimensions: the technology
used, the information available, services delivered, target users, and value architecture for case analyses. The study suggests
that the integrated and self-organizing platforms score over standalone systems. The self-organizing systems offer value cocreation
opportunities to contextualize need-based solutions and provide a substrate for overcoming the limits to localization.
The full paper can be accessed here: https://rdcu.be/dkfJu
On-demand work applications (ODWAs), a type of digital platforms (DPs), are technology-enabled
intermediaries for gig workers. In this paper, we study these platforms and their impact on women
belonging to the low socio-economic section in a developing economy. These women act as
primary unpaid workers while being expected to make an economic contribution. Hence, they
suffer from time scarcity where they need to find mechanisms to generate economic success
from the limited time they have, in a largely informal economy. We employed the theoretical
lens of affordances to delineate the affordances that are provided by the various features of
ODWAs and their impact on life satisfaction of women. We conducted a mixed method study
using interviews of 20 female gig workers, supplemented by a survey of 927 workers on one of
the largest ODWAs in India. Our analysis points to the sense of identity and individuality that
these platforms provide as well as lowering the market boundaries for greater inclusion. Our
research is significant from both, the information systems and inclusion research perspectives,
as it contributes to the theoretical understanding of the impact of DPs on breaking societal
structures and providing avenues to marginalised sections.
Work is increasingly being organised via online platforms outside guiding organisational structures. Instead of having colleagues at work, crowd workers connect in online communities. We investigate how crowd workers build professional holding environments in online communities to compensate for the lack of organisational structures and we consider how they craft their crowd work activities to enhance their work experience and reduce its long‐term precarity. Following a qualitative research design, this paper uses 675 forum interactions collected across six online communities. Based on our findings, we propose the concept of professional holding environments and provide a model for building such holding environments and job crafting in online communities. We thereby expand previous research on holding environments comprised of family members and friends by revealing the impact of professional online communities and their role in professionalisation and crafting supportive social structures in online crowd work.
Recent years have witnessed significant advancements in matching technologies used to improve the matching between workers and employers requesting job tasks on a gig-economy platform. Although conventional wisdom suggests that technologies with higher matching quality benefit the platform by assigning better-matched jobs to workers, we discover a possible unintended revenue-decreasing effect. Our stylized game-theoretic model suggests that, although a technology’s matching enhancement effect can increase a platform’s revenue, the jobs assigned by the better matching technology can also unintentionally reveal more information about uncertain labor demand to workers, especially when demand is low, and thus unfavorably change workers’ participation decisions, resulting in a revenue loss for the platform. We extend our model to cases in which (1) the share of revenue between workers and platform is endogenous, (2) the matching quality can be improved continuously, (3) the opportunity cost of workers is affected by competition between platforms, and (4) workers compete for job tasks. We find consistent results with additional insights, including the optimal matching quality that a platform should pursue. Furthermore, we examine two approaches to mitigate the potential negative effect of using an advanced matching technology for the platform and find that under certain conditions, the platform can benefit from revealing labor demand or competition information directly to workers. Our results shed light on both the intended positive and unintended negative effects of improvements in matching quality and highlight the importance of thoughtful development, management, and application of matching technologies in the gig economy.
This paper was accepted by D. J. Wu, information systems.
Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4770 .
Resumo O presente artigo tem como objetivo compreender as motivações para o engajamento dos trabalhadores que atuam na Sharing Economy (Economia de Compartilhamento) identificadas na literatura científica. Para a concepção do corpus de análise realizou-se uma revisão da literatura, a partir de uma busca na base de dados Web of Science (WOS). Os achados deste estudo apontam para a existência de uma gama de motivações para a participação sharing economy. Verificou-se, ao longo da análise, que se trata de um tema multidisciplinar que, sobretudo no campo dos estudos organizacionais e da gestão, apresenta tendência a privilegiar as motivações de ordem intrínseca, ou seja, aquelas inerentes à atividade, e que tendem a valorizar aspectos como satisfação pessoal, relacionamento social e responsabilidade socioambiental. Em contraposição à abordagem dominante, que tende a privilegiar a agência, em detrimento de influências contextuais, propõe-se neste artigo a adoção da sociologia disposicional de Pierre Bourdieu para a investigação das motivações individuais para o engajamento na sharing economy. Enfatiza-se, portanto, a necessidade de se perseguir a integração das dimensões micro e macro de análise, característica central do arcabouço teórico-empírico do autor. Palavras-chave: Economia de Compartilhamento; Economia Gig; Consumo Colaborativo; Motivação. Abstract This article aims to understand the motivations for the engagement of workers in sharing economy identified in the scientific literature. For the conception of the corpus of analysis, a literature review that analyzed articles, based on a search in the Web of Science (WOS) database. The findings of this study point to the existence of a range of motivations for sharing economy participation. It was verified, throughout the analysis, that this is a multidisciplinary theme that, especially in the field of organizational studies and management, tends to privilege the intrinsic motivations, that is, those inherent to the activity itself, and that tend to value aspects such as personal satisfaction, social relationship, and social and environmental responsibility. In opposition to the dominant approach,
New technology that aims to tackle the systemic and societal problems face challenges bringing together diverse stakeholder perspectives effectively. We evaluate how an emotion-led approach, with a Living Lab process may be effective in these situations. We discuss findings and their implications for this in the context of the development and ongoing maintenance of a web app called "Ask Izzy". Ask Izzy supports people who are homeless or are otherwise disadvantaged by providing information and consequently improving their everyday life and wellbeing. We present a mixed-method evaluation of the web app: firstly, we evaluate impact of key design decisions upon engagement. Secondly, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 30 participants who are either homeless, ex-homeless or service providers and used content analysis. Then we demonstrate that our emotion-led approach brings a novel perspective on concerns from key actors influencing the refinement of the app. The results section outlines emotional goals such as a feeling of control that were important to consider in order to meet the needs of both end users and the wider service provision network. Our study provides recommendations and an approach that may inform others in developing and delivering similar health care and related systems and services.
Microtask gig workers (MGWs) rely on digital platforms to arrange work agreements with requesters to complete well-defined microtasks. Many MGWs use an electronic network of practice (ENP) to facilitate information sharing about desirable and undesirable microtasks. This study uses social capital theory to theorize how social capital’s dimensions – structural, cognitive, and relational – shape the development of uncertainty-reducing and individualized-skill benefits. Based on survey data from 436 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers, the findings demonstrate that unique social capital dimensions affect specific ENP benefits. Understanding the communication style of an ENP (i.e., cognitive social capital) positively influences the uncertainty-reducing benefits of microtask information quality (MIQ) related to MTurk work. Combined with expectations of reciprocity and trust in ENP members (i.e., relational social capital), MIQ shapes microtask opportunity recognition (MOR), whereby individual MGWs identify opportunities to complete financially beneficial microtasks. The present study demonstrates that contextual factors, based on the coopetive nature of microtask ENPs, affect the interrelated structure of social capital theory and its underlying dimensions. Lastly, post hoc findings demonstrate the influence of MOR on MGWs’ financial performance, challenging previously held assumptions about the role of MIQ within the microtask literature.
Crowdsourcing contest has emerged as an innovative way to source ideas and solutions from online public in which only the solvers who make the winning bids receive payoffs. The uncertainty of the payoffs, arising from the competitive attribute of these contests, gives rise to the necessity to understand what sustains solvers’ participation. This study extends self-determination theory (SDT) to the crowdsourcing contest setting to investigate how controlled and autonomous motivation influence solver continuance intention through self-regulations (i.e. metacognitive strategies and emotion control) and when the effect of different motivation types on self-regulations are more or less prevalent. The results indicate that metacognitive strategies do mediate the relationship between motivation type and continuance intention. Meanwhile, as perceived competitive intensity increases, the positive effect of controlled motivation on metacognitive strategies is stronger but its negative effect on emotion control is also exacerbated. In addition, autonomous motivation promotes solvers’ metacognitive strategies and emotion control despite the varying degrees of perceived competitive intensity. These findings offer precious managerial insights into solvers’ continuance intention in crowdsourcing contests.
The prevalent use of digital labor platforms has transformed the nature of work globally. Such algorithm-based platforms have triggered many technological, legal, ethical, and human resource management challenges. Despite some benefits (i.e., flexibility), the precarious conditions and commodification of jobs are major concerns in these platform-based employment conditions. The remote-work paradigm shift during the COVID-19 pandemic has made the interplay between technology, digitalization, and precarious workers' well-being a critical issue to address. This paper focuses on microtask platforms by examining overall well-being associated with turking as a work experience. Using a sample of 401 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic, data were collected on individual conditions affecting the overall quality of workers' lives. The results from two structural equation models demonstrated the direct and mediating effects of task characteristics, excessive working, and financial pressure, mirroring the bright and dark sides of turking. Greater turking task significance and meaningfulness increase personal growth opportunities, ultimately improving workers' perceived quality of life. However, excessive work and greater financial pressure decrease self-acceptance and overall quality of life. This study examines the complicated nature of work experience on algorithm-based platforms by unpacking individual factors that affect workers' well-being.
Our AMICS TREO paper started the conversation regarding the digital variability that exists in different types of crowd work enabled by online platforms, such as Uber, Instacart, Upwork, and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) (Taylor et al., 2020). We argued that the degree to which online platforms digitize their work elements (e.g., tasks, assets, governance, and support services) is germane to understanding how crowd work differs among these platforms. Here we seek to extend this dialogue by highlighting three areas of consideration. These considerations will sharpen the focus of future crowd work research by making the digital variability a central character in information systems (IS) research.
The on-demand economy (or gig economy) is touted “the future of work” characterized by heterogeneous laborers “on the cloud.” Turnover intention (TI) models have been developed to describe employees in the conventional settings and thus may be insufficient for understanding on-demand workers. This study aims to fill this important gap and beyond. We derive a model of discontinuance intention (DI) where job satisfaction is a prominent mediator of the effect of reward fairness. We further theorize and test how and why on-demand workers’ dual commitments toward their online communities arising from workers’ informal social interactions (ISI) may create boundary conditions for the mediating role of job satisfaction. Data were collected from a large sample of 1493 on-demand workers over a four-year span and facilitated the analysis of a moderated mediation model. Results indicate that job satisfaction largely mediates a negative relationship between workers’ perceptions that their rewards are just (i.e., fairness of rewards) and their intention to discontinue work for the on-demand firm. Moreover, workers’ dual commitments toward their online peer communities (OPCs) disrupted this mediating effect. More interestingly, the dual commitments did not moderate the mediation path equally. Overall, our theoretical model and empirical results delineate how discontinuance intention can be affected by a parsimonious set of antecedents in the context of the on-demand economy.
The rapid growth of technology naturally brings the development and transformation of social relationships. The application of this new technology, even an application or a robot, has been transforming the interpersonal relationships between humans. One of its most significant effects appears in the employment relationships even nowadays. We are talking about several segments of this process. From them, we would like to highlight the employment subjects, mainly the owner of the platform. Previously, there were numerous vital studies about platform employees and their rights while for the current study we do it in the frame of the research, which mainly deals with whether the owner of the platform is only an owner or provider or considered as an employer. The phenomenon shows that the legal situation is quite unclear and debatable. Thus, this current study investigates the phenomenon by analysing the platform work practices, theory, and case law. The result reveals that there is a contradiction in the industrial practice regarding this issue as the platform firms tended to escape from the employment-relating obligations, which consequently caused a vulnerable situation for the workers.
Crowdsourcing has become an increasingly popular means of flexibly deploying large amounts of human computational power. The present chapter investigates the role of microtask labor marketplaces in managing human and hybrid human machine computing. Labor marketplaces offer many advantages that in combination allow human intelligence to be allocated across projects rapidly and efficiently and information to be transmitted effectively between market participants. Human computation comes with a set of challenges that are distinct from machine computation, including increased unsystematic error (e.g. mistakes) and systematic error (e.g. cognitive biases), both of which can be exacerbated when motivation is low, incentives are misaligned, and task requirements are poorly communicated. We provide specific guidance about how to ameliorate these issues through task design, workforce selection, data cleaning and aggregation.
This position paper for the workshop Crowd Work 2013 discusses some of the ethical implications of crowd sourcing in general and of contest-based crowd design in particular, especially in regard to the question of fair payment. The paper establishes four different categories of crowd sourcing with separate ethical challenges and argues for the crowd work industry to develop a code of ethics from within, in order to counter the exploitation and abuse that it often enables.
We examine the trade-offs associated with using Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) interface for subject recruitment. We first describe MTurk and its promise as a vehicle for performing low-cost and easy-to-field experiments. We then assess the internal and external validity of experiments performed using MTurk, employing a framework that can be used to evaluate other subject pools. We first investigate the characteristics of samples drawn from the MTurk population. We show that respondents recruited in this manner are often more representative of the U.S. population than in-person convenience samples—the modal sample in published experimental political science—but less representative than subjects in Internet-based panels or national probability samples. Finally, we replicate important published experimental work using MTurk samples.
In this paper, we first provide a practical yet rigorous definition of crowdsourcing that incorporates “crowds,” outsourcing, and social web technologies. We then analyze 103 well-known crowdsourcing websites using content analysis methods and the hermeneutic reading principle. Based on our analysis, we develop a “taxonomic theory” of crowdsourcing by organizing the empirical variants in nine distinct forms of crowdsourcing models. We also discuss key issues and directions, concentrating on the notion of managerial control systems.
The word Crowdsourcing –a compound contraction of Crowd and Outsourcing, was used by Howe in order to define outsourcing to the crowd. Beyond cost, benefits for the company can be substantial. It can externalize the risk of failure and it only pays for products or services that meet its expectations. The Crowdsourcing phenomenon covers heterogeneous situations and it has inspired a number of authors. However, we are still lacking a general and synthetic view of this concept. The aim of our work is to characterize Crowdsourcing in its various aspects. First we define of Crowdsourcing, and provide examples that illustrate the diversity of Crowdsourcing practices and we present similarities and differences between Crowdsourcing and established theories (Open Innovation, User Innovation and Open Source Software). Then, we propose and illustrate a typology of Crowdsourcing practices based on two criteria: the integrative or selective nature of the process and the type of tasks that are crowd sourced (simple, complex and creative tasks). In either case, the client firm seeks to mobilize external competencies. Relying upon the crowd can be an adequate method, because of its unique characteristics that are fostered by the Internet. Finally, we present some potential benefits and pitfalls of Crowdsourcing.
JEL Codes: O32, L17, L24, L29, M19
The goal of the UsersAward programme is to develop and maintain a strategy for better workplace software through user-driven quality assessment. One of its key activities is the user-driven certification of workplace software using the USER CERTIFIED 2002 instrument. In this paper we present a preliminary analysis of the values that inform the criteria and procedure making up the USER CERTIFIED 2002 instrument, using the Value Sensitive Design methodology. We then propose a set of empirical investigations with the different UsersAward stakeholders, which should yield a deeper understanding of some of the critical issues concerning user-driven software assessment programmes.
This article presents a cognitive model of empowerment. Here, empowerment is defined as increased intrinsic task motivation, and our subsequent model identifies four cognitions (task assessments) as the basis for worker empowerment: sense of impact, competence, meaningfulness, and choice. Adopting an interpretive perspective, we have used the model also to describe cognitive processes through which workers reach these conclusions. Central to the processes we describe are workers' interpretive styles and global beliefs. Both preliminary evidence for the model and general implications for research are discussed.
Online crowdsourcing markets (OCM) are becoming more popular as a source for data collection. In this paper, we examine the consistency of survey results across student samples, consumer panels, and online crowdsourcing markets (specifically Amazon's Mechanical Turk) both within the United States and outside. We conduct two studies examining the technology acceptance model (TAM) and the expectation-disconfirmation theory (EDT) to explore potential differences in demographics, psychometrics, structural model estimates, and measurement invariances. Our findings indicate that (1) U.S.-based OCM samples provide demographics much more similar to our student and consumer panel samples than the non-U.S.-based OCM samples; (2) both U.S. and non-U.S. OCM samples provide initial psychometric properties (reliability, convergent, and divergent validity) that are similar to those of both student and consumer panels; (3) non-U.S. OCM samples generally provide differences in scale means compared to those of our students, consumer panels, and U.S. OCM samples; and (4) one of the non-U.S. OCM samples refuted the highly replicated and validated TAM model in the relationship of perceived usefulness to behavioral intentions. Although our post hoc analyses isolated some cultural and demographic effects with regard to the non-U.S. samples in Study 1, they did not address the model differences found in Study 2. Specifically, the inclusion of non-U.S. OCM respondents led to statistically significant differences in parameter estimates, and hence to different statistical conclusions. Due to these unexplained differences that exist within the non-U.S. OCM samples, we caution that the inclusion of non-U.S. OCM participants may lead to different conclusions than studies with only U.S. OCM participants. We are unable to conclude whether this is due to of cultural differences, differences in the demographic profiles of non-U.S. OCM participants, or some unexplored factors within the models. Therefore, until further research is conducted to explore these differences in detail, we urge researchers utilizing OCMs with the intention to generalize to U.S. populations focus on U.S.-based participants and exercise caution in using non-U.S. participants. We further recommend that researchers should clearly describe their OCM usage and design (e.g., demographics, participant filters, etc.) procedures. Overall, we find that U.S. OCM samples produced models that lead to similar statistical conclusions as both U.S. students and U.S. consumer panels at a considerably reduced cost.
We propose a framework of micro-tasking that intrinsically supports the development of workers’ skills. It aims to help developers of micro-tasking systems add skill development capabilities to their systems with minimal development costs. This will allow micro-tasking of skill-intensive work and improve the sustainability of micro-tasking systems. Based on the results of the micro-tasking projects we have carried out, our framework has three core modules: tutorial producer, task dispatcher, and feedback visualizer, which are supported by a back-end skill assessment engine. In closing, we discuss ways to apply the proposed framework to realistic micro-tasking situations.
Crowdsourcing has recently gained a lot of attention as a tool for conducting different kinds of relevance evaluations. At a very high level, crowdsourcing describes outsourcing of tasks to a large group of people instead of assigning such tasks to an in-house employee. This crowdsourcing approach makes possible to conduct information retrieval experiments extremely fast, with good results at a low cost.This paper reports on the first attempts to combine crowdsourcing and TREC: our aim is to validate the use of crowdsourcing for relevance assessment. To this aim, we use the Amazon Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform to run experiments on TREC data, evaluate the outcomes, and discuss the results. We make emphasis on the experiment design, execution, and quality control to gather useful results, with particular attention to the issue of agreement among assessors. Our position, supported by the experimental results, is that crowdsourcing is a cheap, quick, and reliable alternative for relevance assessment.
To raise relevant questions regarding not only the nature and functioning of literary institutions such as publishing houses, public libraries, book clubs and criticism, but also the behaviour of book-buyers and book-borrowers, one should have at one's disposal relevant data. Data bases are likely to be quite extensive. Mostly even before starting to collect these data, the researcher having adequate computer facilities at his disposal will benefit from considering the question of how to manage and analyse the data (to be) collected.The first part of this paper focusses on a number of special programs for data storage and data retrieval like selecting and ordering the data. These programs are known as data management systems. The second part contains a discussion of some fundamental aspects of data analysis. The usefulness of a number of descriptive and statistical methods for analysis are illustrated on the basis of a sample of investigations current at the department of the sociology of literature at Tilburg University.
The pan-national corporation, with its inherently complex structure, is the organizational form most severely affected by globalization. It is therefore important for the management of such corporations to improve the control and coordination of the corporations' spatially dispersed subsidiaries. Information technology (IT) has been hailed as an important tool in changing traditional control and coordination processes in complex environments. This paper presents the results of a study that examined the role of IT in the control and coordination of pan-national corporation subsidiaries in Ireland. The findings indicate that IT is being used for changing the nature of the relationship between headquarters and subsidiaries in a manner that makes the pan-national corporation more global in orientation. This is occurring as operations and decision-making processes in subsidiaries are redesigned in order to improve global management and local responsiveness.Journal of Information Technology 2002 17, 149163. doi:10.1080/02683960210162275
We conduct the first natural field experiment to explore the relationship
between the "meaningfulness" of a task and worker effort. We employed about
2,500 workers from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk), an online labor market, to
label medical images. Although given an identical task, we experimentally
manipulated how the task was framed. Subjects in the meaningful treatment were
told that they were labeling tumor cells in order to assist medical
researchers, subjects in the zero-context condition (the control group) were
not told the purpose of the task, and, in stark contrast, subjects in the
shredded treatment were not given context and were additionally told that their
work would be discarded. We found that when a task was framed more
meaningfully, workers were more likely to participate. We also found that the
meaningful treatment increased the quantity of output (with an insignificant
change in quality) while the shredded treatment decreased the quality of output
(with no change in quantity). We believe these results will generalize to other
short-term labor markets. Our study also discusses MTurk as an exciting
platform for running natural field experiments in economics.
ABSTRACT Even though knowledge management scholars generally advocate explicit management of knowledge, there is research that cautions against the unintended consequences of such efforts. Some researchers go as far as arguing that knowledge and management are contradictory concepts (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2001). This paper explores the apparent double-edged nature of knowledge management by developing a theory-based framework that highlights different fundamental assumptions about knowledge and its management. This framework, which is an adaptation of Burrell and Morgan's four paradigms of social and organizational inquiry, distinguishes among a neo-functionalist, a constructivist, a critical and a dialogic discourse.
We use the contradiction of managing tacit knowledge, which has been highlighted in the knowledge management literature, as an analytical device to explore the four discourses in more detail. We show how notions of knowledge, and what it means to manage knowledge, vary across the four discourses. We conclude that all four discourses need to be appreciated, understood and represented in knowledge management research for this area of inquiry to deal with the rich and problematic nature of managing knowledge in practice.
To understand and promote responsible computing, this paper highlights the importance of analyses based on human agency. We first examine whether computers can be moral agents. Then we draw on research in human factors, cognitive science, and instructional technology to examine how three types of computing practices can be problematic from the perspective of human agency. The first involves anthropomorphizing a computational system, the second, delegating decision making to a computational system, and the third, delegating instruction to a computational system. Throughout this discussion, we provide alternative design goals and methods by which responsible computing can be enhanced as a shared vision and practice within the computing community.
Since the turn of the century, open source software has triggered a vast volume of research. In this essay, based on a brief review of selected work, we show that research in many different fields and disciplines of the social sciences have shed light on the phenomenon. We argue that five characteristics make the phenomenon particularly attractive to examination from various fields and disciplines using a plethora of research methods: (1) impact: open source software has an extensive impact on the economy and society; (2) theoretical tension: the phenomenon deviates sharply from the predictions and explanations of existing theory in different fields; (3) transparency: open source software has offered researchers an unprecedented access to data; (4) communal reflexivity: the community of open source software developers frequently engage in a dialog on its functioning (it also has its own research community); (5) proximity: the innovation process in open source software resembles knowledge production in science (in many instances, open source software is an output of research processes). These five characteristics also promote a transdisciplinary research dialog. Based on the experience of open source software research, we propose that phenomena-driven transdisciplinary research provides an excellent context to promote greater dialog between disciplines and fields. Moreover, we propose that the recent diffusion of the open source software model of innovation to other areas than software calls for new research and that the field of information systems has an important role to play in this future research agenda.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing system in which tasks are distributed to a population of thousands of anonymous workers for completion. This system is increasingly popular with researchers and developers. Here we extend previous studies of the demographics and usage behaviors of MTurk workers. We describe how the worker population has changed over time, shifting from a primarily moderate-income, U.S.-based workforce towards an increasingly international group with a significant population of young, well-educated Indian workers. This change in population points to how workers may treat Turking as a full-time job, which they rely on to make ends meet.
This polemic concludes with two programmatic recommendations for the Information Systems (IS) field. First, a call for more research in the public services, and for greater civic engagement generally; second, that we shake off our enchantment with Theory, not least in the interests of dissemination and communication, especially with non-academic audiences. Our critique of theory uses Barthes’ structuralism to argue that theories are myths which order, interpret and normalise the world. Leading into this, we address the fundamental question “what is a fact”, drawing on the epistemology of Ludwik Fleck (his concepts of thought-style and thought-collective in particular) which we believe deserves more recognition in IS. The empirical material for our analyses comes from two case studies, both from the domain of child protection in the UK. The paper is introduced with a brief exposition of the myth that information systems are fact-repositories. We stress that, though based on domestic examples, our messages are universal and strategic for the field. To set the scene, the paper opens with some lines from Aeschylus, describing a mythical event at the outset of Agamemnon’s ill-fated Trojan campaign.
Paid crowd workers are not just an API call---but all too often, they are treated like one.
This paper investigates aspects of the history and current state of interpretivism in IS research. The emergence of interpretivism is explored through the identification of a network of IS researchers working in the interpretive tradition, through an examination of the role of mainstream and alternative IS journals, and through an analysis of the rhetoric used to support interpretive claims. The paper contributes to analysis of the development of the IS field as a whole, and provides some conceptual ideas and a reference point for further work in this relatively neglected area of research. Copyright © 1995, Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences.
This article confronts the thorny questions that arise in attempting to apply traditional employment and labor law to emerging online “crowdsourcing” labor markets, and offers some provisional regulatory recommendations designed to clarify the employment relationship and protect crowd workers. Crowdsourcing refers to the process of taking tasks that would normally be delegated to an employee and distributing them to a large pool of online workers, the “crowd,” in the form of an open call. The article describes how crowdsourcing works, its advantages and risks, and why particular subsections of the paid crowdsourcing industry expose employees to substandard working conditions without much recourse to the law. Taking Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” as a case study, it investigates the legal status of the “crowd,” exploring the nature of the employment relationship and the complications that might arise in applying existing work laws. In doing so it draws on employment and labor case law, but also on other areas of internet law in order to illustrate how courts grapple with the migration of regulated activity into unregulated cyberspace. Finally, the article makes a case for regulatory intervention, based on both the vulnerability of crowd workers and the failure of the law to keep up with the technological developments that drive our information economy. To that end, it presents recommendations for legislatures seeking to expand legal protections for crowdsourced employees, suggestions for how courts and administrative agencies can pursue the same objective within our existing legal framework, voluntary “best practices” for firms and venues involved in crowdsourcing, and examples of how crowd workers might begin to effectively organize and advocate on their own behalf.
Senator Warner Calls for New Policy to Address On Demand Economy
- H Shaban
Shaban, H. 2015. "Senator Warner Calls for New Policy to
Address On Demand Economy," BuzzFeed News, June 4, 2015
(http://www.buzzfeed.com/hamzashaban/on-demand-economycollides-with-presidential-politics-in-war#.pdw2qGKn8N;
Ladies' Home Journal Ventures into Bold Crowdsourcing Experiment
- S C Sivek
Sivek, S. C. 2012. "Ladies' Home Journal Ventures into Bold
Crowdsourcing Experiment," Mediashift, January 24
(http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2012/01/ladies-home-journalventures-into-bold-crowdsourcing-experiment024.html).
Twenty Years of the European Information Systems Academy at ECIS: Emergent Trends and Research Topics
- M K Stein
- R D Galliers
Stein, M. K., Galliers, R. D., and Whitley, E. A. 2014. "Twenty
Years of the European Information Systems Academy at ECIS:
Emergent Trends and Research Topics," European Journal of
Information Systems, forthcoming (http://www.palgrave-journals.
com/ejis/journal/vaop/ncurrent/pdf/ejis201425a.pdf;
doi:10.1057/ejis,2015.25).
On the Ethics of Crowd-Sourced Research
- V Williamson
Williamson, V. 2014. "On the Ethics of Crowd-Sourced Research,"
unpublished paper, Harvard University (http://scholar.harvard.
edu/files/williamson/ files/mturk_ps_081014.pdf).
The Myth of Amateur Crowds: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Crowdsourcing Coverage
- D C Brabham
Brabham, D. C. 2012. "The Myth of Amateur Crowds: A Critical
Discourse Analysis of Crowdsourcing Coverage," Information,
Communication and Society (15:3), pp. 394-410.
Enterprise Crowdsourcing Blasts Off as Social Media Growth Industry
- D Bratvold
Bratvold, D. 2011. "Enterprise Crowdsourcing Blasts Off as Social
Media Growth Industry" (http://www.businessesgrow.com/2011/
12/13/enterprise-crowdsourcing-blasts-off-as-social-mediagrowth-industry/; retrieved October 2014).
Is Crowdsourcing a Source of Worker Empowerment or Exploitation? Understanding Crowd Workers' Perceptions of Crowdsourcing Career
- X Deng
- K D Joshi
Deng, X., and Joshi, K. D. 2013. "Is Crowdsourcing a Source of
Worker Empowerment or Exploitation? Understanding Crowd
Workers' Perceptions of Crowdsourcing Career," in Proceedings
of 34 th International Conferences on Information Systems, Milan,
Italy.
Keep it Simple: Reward and Task Design in Crowdsourcing
- A Finnerty
- P Kucherbaev
- S Tranquillini
Finnerty, A., Kucherbaev, P., Tranquillini, S., and Convertino, G.
2013. "Keep it Simple: Reward and Task Design in Crowdsourcing," in Proceedings of the Biannual Conference of the
Italian Chapter of SIGCHI, New York: Association for
Computing Machinery, Article 14.
Informed Consent in the Mozilla Browser: Implementing Value-Sensitive Design
- B Friedman
- D C Howe
- E Felten
Friedman, B., Howe, D. C., and Felten, E. 2002. "Informed
Consent in the Mozilla Browser: Implementing Value-Sensitive
Design," in Proceedings of the 35 th Annual Hawaii International
Conference on System Science, Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE
Computer Society.
Human Values, Ethics, and Design," in The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook: Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications
- B Friedman
Friedman, B., and Kahn Jr., P. H. 2003. "Human Values, Ethics,
and Design," in The Human-Computer Interaction Handbook:
Fundamentals, Evolving Technologies and Emerging Applications, J. A. Jacko and A. Sears (eds.), Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, Inc., pp. 1177-1201.